Dr. Wolfgang Martin Boerner, lifelong professor of the University of Illinois at Chicago, visited RADI and gave a report titled as “Overview of Fully Polarimetric SAR in Geoscience and Remote Sensing” at the 88th academic forum of Earth Observation and Digital Earth on October 13.
Dr. Boemer’s report involved four main parts. Firstly, he introduced natural disasters facing mankind like earthquake, tsunami, volcano and hurricanes from the view of Earth Evolution and Plate Tectonics. He also emphasized the problems and challenges that remote sensing technique faced according to the development of spaceborne Earth observation. Then, he briefly introduced the state-of-art spaceborne fully polarimetric SAR systems and the radar polarimetry theory, and gave several examples to demonstrate the important role of polarimetric SAR in the application of environment and disasters. As the third part of his speech, he analyzed the need for multi-band polarimetric SAR systems, and looked forward for the development of future spaceborne SAR systems. He concluded his speech by saying “Natural hazards are inevitable. Natural disasters are not.”
Wolfgang Martin Boerner received the Ph. D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in 1967. Since1978, he has been a professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Boerner is a member of numerous international scientific societies. He is a member of the honor societies Sigma Xi, the American and German Fulbright Associations, and the Alexander von Humboldt Association.